Between the mountains and the sea
by Dal Niente
Summary: Legolas had assumed they were already at the bottom of Gimli's vocal range but he was wrong, he was wrong, and if he were not wildly in love with Gimli already this absolutely would have sealed the deal. These are notes he had not believed possible.


A/N: I wrote this to scratch an itch and try something different, style-wise. I've been playing with it for like three years and if I don't post it soon, I probably never will, so...here :) Unfortunately, I've lost my notes on what the Khuzdûl in this fic originally meant, but there isn't a whole lot so I'm not terribly worried about upsetting the flow. If I find my notes, I'll put translations in as hovertext.

This fic could also be called "a soprano's ode to standing next to a bass while singing Dan Forrest's _Selah_ or Michael McGlynn's _Lux Aeterna_," but that title sounded really niche. (Legolas is not a soprano. I am.) That said, the giliath-linnol is a real thing that happens when people sing certain chords in perfect tune with each other: the sound comes together constructively to build a note no one sings but everyone hears. I'm taking some liberties with how it works, here, but the core of it is based in reality.

* * *

They visit the Glittering Caves first. This is fine by Gimli—he's dying to have another, longer look at all the shining halls and vaulting ceilings he hurried past before. Here is his chance for a second study, without the war clamoring in his mind.

He isn't complaining about the delay of his eventual return to Fangorn, either. The longer they linger in the Caves, the better, as far as he's concerned.

They travel slowly, taking their time. Aglarond is labyrinthine and vast, as he'd known she would be: an ocean of darkness hiding splendor beyond anything Dwarven miners and mitecrafts have yet dreamed of. The quantity and density of crystals seem to correlate directly to depth; he and Legolas leave the usual cave-mud and sand behind them almost absurdly early in their delving, trading these familiar hallmarks for floors and walls of sandpaper quartz that flirts, geodesque, between the usual calcium deposits. Stone blooms like flowers and hangs like moss in the wider halls, and glimmers with promise in every narrow crevice. The two travelers spend nearly seven hours picking their way through a single passage filled with great spires of stone as wide as tree trunks rooted in rock, which spear in all directions around them. They pass a pool which, in the light of their lanterns, casts a perfect mirror reflection of the shimmering draperies and stalactites hanging down from the ceiling above.

This place is glorious in every sense and possible meaning of the word. Gimli is _thriving_.

There is no shortage of fresh water on this journey, and, bonus: the springs are cold enough to make even Legolas shiver. Gimli teases him mercilessly about this but helps him rinse the mud out of his hair anyway, making fun of him the entire time because he has no dwarf-curls to dry the mud and crack it free; he has to wash in water. Legolas accepts the ribbing with his usual good humor and gives as good as he gets, laughing and splashing water at Gimli when he can. He is as bright and merry below ground as he is above it—when they've stopped for a while. When they're walking, he's different.

It's a subtle change. Gimli doesn't notice right away. But he answers too quickly, and his gaze is too restless and keeps sliding back to Gimli. He holds himself just as tall and square as he always does, ceiling permitting, but he's—jumpy.

Gimli doesn't ask about it. He wants to, but he can't figure out how to phrase the question in a way that won't offend. Elves are less strange to him now than they were a year ago, but a year ago they were all but totally alien; _less strange_ is still pretty strange—especially considering how much of Elven communication seems to be nonverbal. But, he tells himself, Legolas will surely speak if he's too uncomfortable. He's out of his element, that's all. Nothing to worry about, as long as they're careful, and Gimli _is _careful: he keeps comparatively close to the surface and talks to Legolas almost constantly. He talks about navigating underground—the Dwarven method is different to the Elven. He talks about the differences in rock formations, the signs and marks of the caves' origins.

He admits, one night as he's lying in his bedroll staring up at the inky ceiling, that he's already thinking of a million different ways to speak with Eomer about establishing a Dwarven settlement here. Maybe more than a settlement, maybe even a city. If Eomer agrees, Gimli will have all the time he could ever desire to map these tunnels and halls.

And maybe Gimli is worrying for nothing, because Legolas seems honestly pleased about the idea, even excited. He offers a few ideas of his own, offers turns of phrase that might play on Eomer's pride and humility at once. So, maybe he's not as bothered by the caves as Gimli fears.

Good. He doesn't want to cut this exploration short. The future will be different. The future will be a Dwarven endeavor. This, here, now, with Legolas, is…

Well. Gimli would rather not cut it short.

So he doesn't mention it, but he does continue to ensure they stay at…well, shallow-_ish_ depths. It's a struggle, but the sights aren't lacking here. He knows he isn't missing much, despite the pull of the bottomless dark below.

This is not overly burdensome for him. It isn't. It isn't. Not compared to the alternative, which would be to drag Legolas into the true depths of the mountain, which…feels wrong. Too much a violation of his friend's trust, too much to ask of an Elf's comfort levels, his boundaries. Gimli wouldn't. He can't.

The only trouble is: the drive to run deep positively _gnaws _under his skin. To see the deepest yawning gulfs, to hear their songs, to give his voice to the mountain's heart. It _itches_. Gimli can run for days for the sake of an almost-certainly-lost cause, but itching is another story.

He resists for a while, but he can't hold out forever. Several days into their exploration, when Legolas curls up on his side on the floor and his eyes' clear focus fades, Gimli swallows hard, gets to his feet, and turns and follows the deepening call. He won't be long, he tells himself. He'll satisfy his curiosity and return within the hour. Two hours, at most.

Okay. Three.

Nearly five hours later, Legolas blinks and pulls away from his fugue and finds himself alone. His dark-lantern sits on the floor beside him with its flame stuttering.

Starless darkness and stagnant air press close around him. He stretches, sits up, and shoves them both away, peering owlishly around at the cave.

There's a switch on his lantern's top that lets him bring the light steady, but he doesn't bring it much brighter. The crystal inside will need to last some time yet, and he isn't wholly certain how the dark-lantern works or how to pace its use. The lantern is a Dwarven piece; even the crystal is Dwarf-made, crafted in the heat of molten rock under one of their southern mountains. "Purified pit-coal," Gimli had said with a shrug, when asked, "and lime." While Legolas knows what each of those words means individually, he's unsure of their significance in combination. But he hadn't pressed for any further explanation; as long as Gimli knows how the lanterns work, he's satisfied.

But he doesn't need to brighten the lantern too much. His dark-vision is good even in almost no light at all. And even if it comes to traveling in utter darkness, he has his methods—he'll still be able to navigate at least a little way from their camp.

More important than light or the quality of air, most important: Gimli is missing. His dark-lantern is similarly absent.

Hm.

Legolas sits for a moment in the flickerlight shadows, considering his next move. The forests at home host spiders the size of ponies, but the caves of his father's mountain halls are home to other crawling things in their deep places—pale, ugly crawling things, with too many teeth and too few eyes. Worry curls in his stomach for a moment before he gathers up his lantern and his knives and rolls onto his feet.

He shoves his concern to the back of his mind. If a specific need arises, then he will worry, but not now. For now, if Gimli is missing, Legolas will find him. If there are crawling things with too many teeth, Legolas will kill them. That is what is needed. So, that is what he will do.

He hangs the lantern briefly on his forearm so he can bring the fingertips of both hands to rest on the crystal-crusted walls, then shuts his eyes. This is an imperfect way to search for a companion, but Gimli's boots may be heavy enough to pick up the call, if he's still close. Humming in his chest, Legolas sends subsonic pulses through the rock until he sets his bones to vibrating with the stones that surround him.

He's reasonably good at this, for what little that's worth—this is an old trick, and imperfect. His casting returns in prickling echoes, providing him with a gentle map of nearby passageways and dead ends, which he'd expected—

—and then an active pulse returns, which he had not. His eyes pop open and he jerks his hands back from the wall. Either Gimli is wearing heavier shoes than he'd thought, or the mountain is alive, or...or…

He isn't sure what other possibilities are available. He grits his teeth, puzzled and annoyed about it. Gimli has been remarkably forthcoming with answers to questions, but Legolas still knows too little of Dwarves.

After a moment's additional contemplation, he strips off his light shoes, gathers up a few days' rations and water, and takes a passage through the crevice at the rear of the cavern where he and Gimli are camped.

Perhaps a Noldo would have been lost and turned around, but Legolas is a wood-elf of Mirkwood, raised as much below ground as in treetops. Yes, he is deeper here than he has ever been in his life before; yes, this is unsettling, but the humming rock shows him the paths to follow as he descends through the twists and branches of the cave system. He keeps his lantern low: bright enough to show him his path, dark enough not to blind him. Between his eyes, his feet, and the subsonic vibrations of the stone, he's far from lost.

(As long as the stone keeps humming, he thinks, he'll be able to trace the mountain's pulse to its source. If the pulse stops—well, then he may be truly lost. But he doesn't think on this for long. If he is lost, Gimli will find him.)

He hears Gimli before he sees him. He is singing.

This is the call Legolas had picked up and has been following. He hesitates briefly at the mouth of the cavern where he's sure Gimli is. He hasn't known Gimli to sing, until now. Gimli has never spoken of doing so, and he'd waited until Legolas was well into his reverie to excuse himself, and—

—_wait—_

—_is that—_

Amazement overtakes both his uncertainty and his lingering irritation at being abandoned half a league underground, and he slips into the cavern. And yes, there's Gimli, standing alone in heavy pitch-darkness nearly two miles below their camp, planted at the edge of a ragged cliff with nothing behind it, chanting with his full voice, deep, low in his throat.

The words aren't anything Legolas recognizes; he supposes they must be Khuzdûl. Their echoes roil and roll and build off each other into many-voiced chords, which is impressive enough on its own, but the last thing Legolas was expecting, the absolute last thing he ever would have thought to hear called by a single Dwarven voice in the depths of a mountain hall, is the _giliath-linnol_ threading its high descant above the rest of the music.

Starsong. Here, starsong, _here_, miles below the surface of the earth.

He approaches his friend in silence, dumbfounded. There's a slow, slow melody, but Gimli isn't singing it; he's drawing it from the living rock though echo and repetitive pitch changes. It's incredible, impossible. Incalculable.

Legolas comes to a halt close to where Gimli is standing. He gazes blindly up and around at what little he can see of the wall behind him, the floor—the darkness in this massive space is heavy and that's all he can see: some of the wall, the floor, and Gimli. And a slightly deeper shadow where he'd entered the cavern. Velveteen darkness swallows everything else.

He stares into nothing and listens with his heart in his mouth and his fëa writhing under his skin until Gimli stumps over and pokes him in the navel.

"Could use another voice," Gimli says, "damp your light; follow me if you can." He's chanting again before his words' echoes die away, but the _giliath-linnol _falters and breaks.

Legolas swallows but raises his own voice as he shutters his lantern, plunging the world around him into total invisibility. He's unaccustomed to chanting, but he picks up the song as best he can. Harsh vowels and harsher consonants pull in his chest, his throat. He must be butchering the words, if indeed they _are_ words, but he does his best. He's a fast learner; he trusts in this, at least.

Despite Legolas' personal misgivings, Gimli seems to decide he's doing well after only a few minutes. He crunches a few more steps to stand so Legolas is facing him, and then suddenly—suddenly then Gimli switches his voice—skips it down the octave—and _oh_—

Oh, Legolas had assumed they were already at the bottom of Gimli's vocal range but he was wrong, he was _wrong_, and if he were not wildly in love with Gimli already this absolutely would have sealed the deal. These are notes he had not believed possible; he can feel them in his skin, in his sternum, behind his ribs, trembling up his spine to the crown of his skull. Amplified by rock and crystal, Gimli's deepening voice howls in the stones, in Legolas—it's in his bones, in his blood, in his stars in the soul of him _holy holy holy_—

Legolas keeps to the tune Gimli showed him. The tone and timbre are unlike the Elven singing he's used to, but he does his best to match them until the _giliath-linnol _picks its way back into their song: high, clear, wordless and as old as Time. This is sound born of sound itself; this is star-song—stone-song—this is the song that birthed the world and Legolas is burning with it, bleeding with it—dizzy with it, reeling—

He sings. He cannot do anything else.

It might only be a minute or it might be another hour later when Gimli drones away into silence. The echoes bend and finally break, but the spell itself doesn't break until Gimli moves—and he doesn't move until silence settles. Cave-silence, of course, not true-silence: water is dripping somewhere, and from other places come the soft scratchings of tiny blind things minding their gentle business in the dark. But it doesn't matter. Legolas is outside himself, beside himself, shattered and shattering, throatsore and heartsick.

But, eventually, Gimli shifts. He rustles around for a moment, and then there's a _clink_ as he finds his dark-lantern and then there's light. Not a lot of light, just enough that Legolas can make out the grin under Gimli's beard, but the world comes with it. Legolas flinches back a step.

"Well," Gimli says, oblivious to the fact that his companion is still almost falling over, nearly staggering at the quiet after being filled with so much sound. "Well, that's not bad. That's not bad at all. Always sounds better with two."

After a few moments of searching, Legolas finds his tongue. "What—was that," he says, stammering the Westron through numb lips. He hasn't felt this dazed and confused since a particularly embarrassing incident with the spiders when he was barely grown (which Gimli must never, ever find out about; he'd never let him live it down). "What. Was that. What did we."

Gimli ducks around him and starts to trudge back up the slope. "_Ikmêth-udu-akmâth_," he says over his shoulder, sounding only slightly more gravelly than usual. "One of the…hm, the _kemthêl_. They're a sort of…" He pauses, frowning, half-turning as he searches for the word. "What's a song that's important in your stomach?" he finally asks.

He blinks and tries to think. It's difficult. "Lay?" he tries, but Gimli shakes his head and starts to head off again. Legolas tries again. "Ballad?"

"No. Not a story. It hits you, pounds at you, here," thumping a fist in the vicinity of his solar plexus.

"Hymn," Legolas suggests, after considering this for a second. Gimli turns and stares down at him from the mouth of the dark passage.

"Say again?" he says, and when Legolas does, he declares, "That's not a word."

"It is," Legolas tells him, finally moving to join him and sending him a smile that doesn't feel like his own. "It's a…a reverence, I suppose? Our songs to Elbereth are hymns, more or less."

At that, Gimli wrinkles his face, which frankly doesn't need any more wrinkling than it already has. Legolas tells him so, and Gimli snorts and hits him before he starts walking again, leading the way back to their camp. Legolas laughs and they leave the mystery of _kemthêl_ behind them.

(It's not a song to Aulë, Gimli explains later, unbidden; it's a song of the stone, of dark, deep places. It can only be sung in dark, deep places. It's a song _of_ caves, not to or about them. The words Legolas thought he was singing weren't words at all, but Dwarven approximations of the songs sung by rocks.)

(Legolas does his best to understand, but he lacks Gimli's background. Elven singing is almost entirely lyric. Elves walk underneath the whispering trees and listen to their songs, but Elves don't sing back. Elves do not have any songs _of_.)

(What he does understand is the part Gimli doesn't mention—the part he tells him through his actions, like not pushing the issue of translation. Like the fact that he won't stand face-to-face with Legolas for a day and a half after that, and when he turns away, it's always to the left. Legolas is an Elf; half his language is unspoken. So, this is the part he does understand, and what he understands is actually pretty simple: whatever else _kemthêl_ are, they are important, and he is lucky to have heard one, let alone have been invited to participate.)

(He wants to ask more questions, a hundred hundred questions, but he does not. To ask would be discourteous. He has no guarantee this will not be their final journeying together; he would not have Gimli depart in bitterness, remembering discourtesy.)

(Or at all.)

(He does not speak of this, either, though it pains him.)

Instead, he pushes Gimli to lead him farther down, farther in, to take this turn instead of that fork, _no, that one slopes upward; what about this one, this one is steeper, narrower; look, here is a crystal formation you haven't shown me, there may be more below_. He finds Gimli reluctant, finds this baffling.

"It's deep," Gimli argues, for probably the tenth time, as he finishes his pipe while they break camp. "Very deep. That road runs deeper than any I've seen that wasn't Dwarf-mined."

"Have we rations enough?" Legolas asks, trying a new line of questioning. He knows Gimli cannot be afraid; it doesn't occur to him to even ask. "Water enough?"

"Rations yes, water yes," Gimli replies, "but I'm not sure you're hearing me. This mountain is—_zindâkhalât_—I don't have the word in Westron or Sindarin. Maybe there isn't one. Very deep. The heart of it will put all exit routes out of your range." Legolas has already shown him how he navigates underground. It's different to Gimli's method of scouting—Legolas has to ask the mountain for nearby paths, whereas Gimli simply knows how a mountain is built and keeps a map in his head of places he's been already—but he'd been fascinated, nonetheless.

Legolas shakes his head, marveling. No, Gimli is not afraid, not for himself—but perhaps for Legolas? A wonder. "Do _you_ want to go? Look at me." He crouches under the pretense of gathering up his dark-lantern, finds his light and, with it, the Dwarf's glittering gaze; he holds it, challenging. "No more misdirection. You know I am too far underground even now to see any exits."

"Yet you could find your way back," Gimli says, his voice a low rumble, "if you needed to. But if we go deeper—"

"Do you want to go?"

Gimli huffs a sigh, gestures with a hand. "You know well enough I do."

"Then let us go!" Legolas rises to his feet and spreads his hands, his lantern swinging carelessly from his slim wrist and sending shadows dancing up the walls. "You wish to delve, and so we shall. Why do you not reach for your pack?"

"You'll be all right?" Gimli asks, and there's a sharpness to his tone that makes Legolas prick his ears and look down at him. "Bearing the full weight of the mountain above you, and still more miles of rock all around you, with no way out that you can find? That sounds like a good time to you, does it?"

"That sounds fine," Legolas tells him, amazed that he thinks it might not. No _perhaps_, then; he has his answer. Gimli is dragging his heels for Legolas' sake. Ridiculous, stubborn creature! "Of course, I'll be fine. I'll be with you."

Gimli stares at him.

Legolas stares back, confused. The silence stretches between them—stretches further, then yawns wide in a way it hasn't since before Moria. Hurt, he says again, enunciating clearly, "Gimli. I want to go. You…I want you to see all that you will of this place. And I want you to show me." He shrugs his shoulders in mortal fashion. "It is very beautiful, and _you_ want to see it—I do know you want to; you are obvious to a fault—and I cannot see it without you! I have not the memory for these deep paths." He laughs a little, waves at the cavern around him. "I am entirely lost, already. Surely, you know this."

Gimli opens his mouth, then closes it. He turns his pipe over his knee, taps it out, cleans the bowl with the hem of his sleeve.

"If—you don't want to show me," Legolas says, his heart sinking, "only—only—say so. I'll press this no further, I'll take no offense. But—"

"Shut up," Gimli tells him, not unkindly. He stows his pipe, gets to his feet, shoulders his pack. "I didn't think you meant…but, all right. If you're sure."

"I won't _lie_ to you," Legolas says, after a second, turning away.

"I don't think you're lying." Gimli watches him gather his things. "Figured you were being…polite."

Legolas fiddles with his dark-lantern. There's enough light that the amusement on his face is clear when he turns back. "Gimli," he says, "I am Thranduil's son. I mastered the six formal tones of declination before your great-grandmother's great-grandmother was a twinkle in _her_ mother's eye. If I am blunt enough to say I want something, Gimli Gloinul," he concludes, coming to rest a hand on Gimli's shoulder, "either take me at my word, or shoot me where I stand.

"Now, lead on, or I'll change my mind just to be contrary."

Gimli laughs and claps him on the back. "Fair enough, my friend," he agrees. "Fair enough."


End file.
